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The Inbound Sales and Marketing Blog

Your prospects have a long list of business problems. They also have many questions related to how technology could be used to solve these business problems.

Most business leaders are open to getting help in solving their business problems. However, most people have been burned at one point because they have made a bad buying decision. This is especially true in the area of technology where many promises are made but the actual results end up not delivering. As a result, today’s buyer is very skeptical.

As you grow new business areas like Managed Services, Document Solutions, Production Print or Wide Format one of the most valuable tools you can have are case studies. Let’s face it -- everyone knows and trusts you as a great provider of copiers. And, the value proposition for a copier or printer is fairly simple.

The trust you have for office equipment may not immediately translate into these new business areas. Just because you have serviced someone’s copiers for 20 years doesn’t mean they will trust you with their network support or workflow software.

At the same time, the value propositions for these new areas is more complex than a value proposition for a copier. Your clients understand what they are buying when they buy a copier (for the most part...) but they may not understand the full value proposition of a cloud-based document management system or a managed network security package.

If you're not familiar with Google Analytics, then you know that it can be very confusing to navigate through the website. Something as simple as adding a new user can seem challenging if you can't find where to do it!

Today as the Arkansas Razorbacks get ready to play in the College World Series there is one thing I know for sure: the more at bats they get, the higher chance they will get on base and score runs.

Whether you are a business owner, sales manager, or sales rep, you need to be involved in as many deals as possible if you want to hit your goals. In sales, you want to make the short list of vendors under consideration. If you make that list, at least you have an “at bat.”

Here’s the challenge: the way buyers make their short list of potential vendors has changed. If you don’t recognize this, you will miss out on many opportunities for net-new businesses.

Blogging continues to be the backbone of content and inbound marketing.

While video is an ever-increasing tool to use to connect to your audience, the humble blog will continue on as a way to bring in traffic. I mean, after all, one of the ways to share videos you create is – you may have guessed – a blog post.

Blogs have been around for roughly 20 years now. Blogs and “posts” are often used interchangeably. For this post, “blog” refers to the portion of your website devoted to sharing information while “post” refers to the individual, er, posts within the blog.

One of the culprits of slower-than-they-could be sales is ignoring the many opportunities of social media. Every day, there’s an audience of millions consuming thoughts and ideas that help them choose products or get their jobs done more effectively.

This is an audience you can and should tap into. I’m going to focus on two simple steps you can take to leverage your sales reps’ LinkedIn connection. We’ve found that sales reps have an average of 500 Linkedin connections. So, if you have 10 reps, you have an audience of 5,000.

The most common mistake businesses make is writing like they're a business.

While I've noticed a shift to a friendlier writing style in the past decade, partially thanks to social media and I'm sure influenced as well by Millennials entry into the working world in large numbers, there's still waaaaay too much bad business writing out there.

It's boring. It's formulaic. It's about your business (not about your clients' challenges). It's full of jargon and insider lingo. Most likely, if you have an “assessment” of some sort you don't even describe exactly what that even is.

Quick test: have someone in your office copy a few pages from each of your competitor's websites as well as your own.

At a recent industry trade show, I saw some ridiculous statistics about the effectiveness of email marketing. Yes, email can be highly effective. However, done the wrong way, it can be destructive. How do you take advantage of email to get results without the risks?